University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa physicists enjoyed particular satisfaction—and a little self-congratulation—at the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics.

The UH scientists had a hand both in bringing the winning work to the attention of the scientific community three decades ago, and in recent experiments that validated the theory.

In 1973 UH Professor Sandip Pakvasa and then-Visiting Professor Hirotaka Sugawara spotted a paper by Nobel co-recipients Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Masukawa in a Japanese journal.

The paper described the concept of broken symmetry, which predicts that certain subatomic particles do not break down in symmetrical fashion due to a flaw in the symmetry between matter and anti-matter.